While the cabinet members squabbled over patronage, they united in their resentment of Seward’s preeminent position. They were irritated that he was the one who called the cabinet into session, and the time he spent with Lincoln inspired jealousy. Finally, with Chase as their “spokesman,” they requested that cabinet meetings be held at regular times. Lincoln agreed, designating Tuesdays and Fridays at noon.
Still, Seward was recognized as the man who had the president’s ear. William Russell of The Times in London capitalized on this intimacy when he first arrived in Washington. Russell was then forty-one, a spectacled, lively, rotund Englishman whose sparkling reports from the Crimean War had made him a celebrity in London. At a dinner party on March 26, he was fascinated by Seward, “a subtle, quick man, rejoicing in power…fond of badinage, bursting with the importance of state mysteries.” The next day, Seward arranged for Russell to slip into a White House reception for the Italian minister. Russell recalled that Lincoln “put out his hand in a very friendly manner, and said, ‘Mr. Russell, I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this country. The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world—in fact, I don’t know anything which has much more power—except perhaps the Mississippi.’”
Russell attended the Lincolns’ first state dinner that evening. Arriving at the White House, he noted that Mary “was already seated to receive her guests.” He found her features “plain, her nose and mouth of an ordinary type, and her manners and appearance homely, stiffened, however, by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer; she is profuse in the introduction of the word ‘sir’ in every sentence.”
Once acquainted with all the cabinet officers and the various guests, Russell rated Chase, with his “fine forehead” and his “face indicating energy and power,” as “one of the most intelligent and distinguished persons in the whole assemblage.” He was particularly taken with Kate Chase, whom he described as “very attractive, agreeable, and sprightly.” Kate was in her element, talking “easily, with a low melodious voice…her head tilted slightly upward, a faint, almost disdainful smile upon her face, as if she were a titled English lady posing in a formal garden for Gainsborough or Reynolds.” As her father’s hostess, Kate stood fourth in official Washington society. Her only real rival was Mrs. Lincoln, since neither Ellen Hamlin nor Frances Seward had any desire for social aggrandizement. “In reality, there was no one in Washington to compare with Kate Chase,” one of Kate’s intimate friends later told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “She was the queen of society. Men showered adulation upon her and went on their knees to her. I have never seen a woman who has so much personal charm and magnetism.” The possibly apocryphal story spread of Kate’s introduction to Mary that night. “I shall be glad to see you any time, Miss Chase,” Mary said. Kate replied: “Mrs. Lincoln, I shall be glad to have you call on me at any time.” Though Mary would later manifest intense jealousy of Kate, it is doubtful that Kate’s remark spoiled her pleasure that glittering evening.
At the formal dinner, “there was a Babel of small talk,” Russell observed, “except when there was an attentive silence caused by one of the President’s stories…for which he is famous.” As he reeled off one humorous anecdote after another, no one could have guessed that earlier that day, Lincoln had received devastating news from General Scott. In a written memorandum, Scott had advised that it was now unlikely, “according to recent information from the South, whether the voluntary evacuation of Fort Sumter alone would have a decisive effect upon the States now wavering between adherence to the Union and secession.” Fort Pickens would also have to be abandoned, Scott argued, in order to “give confidence to the eight remaining slave-holding States.”
Shortly before the state dinner ended, Lincoln called his cabinet colleagues aside and asked them to follow him into a different room. Montgomery Blair would long remember Lincoln’s agitation as he revealed the contents of Scott’s report. “A very oppressive silence succeeded,” Blair recalled, interrupted only by his own angry retort that Scott was playing “politician and not General,” a comment directed at Seward’s influence with Scott. Like his son, Blair Senior had long believed that Lincoln should have announced the reinforcement of Sumter at the time of his inauguration and he blamed Seward for Lincoln’s “timid temporizing policy.” It was Andrew Jackson’s motto, he reminded, that “if you temporize, you are lost.”
THAT NIGHT, Lincoln was unable to sleep. The time for musing and assessment was at an end. He must make the decision between a surrender that might compromise the honor of the North and tear it apart, or a reinforcement that might carry the country into civil war. Later he confessed to Browning, “of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumpter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
At noon the next day, the cabinet convened. Lincoln presented all the intelligence he had gathered, including Fox’s report on Major Anderson’s situation and Hurlbut’s conclusion that Unionism was essentially dead in South Carolina. Once more the members were asked to submit their opinions in writing. This time, shaped no doubt by Lincoln’s presentation and General Scott’s disturbing memo, the majority opinion—with only Seward and Smith clearly dissenting—advised that both Sumter and Pickens should be resupplied and reinforced.
Evidence suggests that Lincoln had reached a decision before the cabinet met, for he had already requested that Fox send a list of the “ships, men, and supplies he would need for his expedition.” Several hours after the cabinet adjourned, he also implemented a drastic restructuring of his daily schedule. Much as he wanted to give office seekers their due, he needed time and space to consider the grave problems facing the country. He ordered Nicolay to limit visiting hours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., ending the hectic burden of twelve-hour days that Nicolay knew “would be impossible to sustain for a great length of time.”
For Seward, Lincoln’s decision to reinforce Sumter was shattering. He was in his house on the evening of March 29 when George Harrington, assistant secretary of the treasury, knocked at the door. Harrington had just left the White House, where Welles, Blair, and Fox had met with Lincoln, and “it was finally determined, with the President’s approval to reinforce Fort Sumter.”
“Thunder, George! What are you talking about?” Seward asked. “It cannot be.” When Harrington repeated his news, Seward was irate. “I want no more at this time of the Administration which may be defeated. We are not yet in a position to go to war.” Seward’s success in getting Lincoln to soften the tone of his inaugural address, coupled with the cabinet vote on March 15, decisively echoing his own advice to evacuate Sumter, had left him with the mistaken conviction that he was the power behind a weak president.
Flattering letters from the South had compounded Seward’s erroneous assumption. Frederick Roberts in North Carolina assured him that everyone was looking to him for “a peaceful adjustment of the difficulties.” While Lincoln, the letter continued, was considered throughout the state as “a 3rd rate man,” Seward was looked upon as “the Hector or Atlas of not only his Cabinet, but the giant intellect of the whole north.” Another admirer swore that “Unionists look to yourself, and only to you Sir, as a member of the Cabinet—to save the country.” With these judgments of both the president’s failings and his own stature, Seward wholeheartedly agreed. He confided to Adams that Lincoln had “no conception of his situation—much absorption in the details of office dispensation, but little application to great ideas.” Adams needed little convincing. Despite accepting the high-ranking appointment as minister to Great Britain, he remained dismissive of Lincoln, writing in his diary: “The man is not equal to the hour.” The only hope, he repeatedly wrote, lay in the secretary of state’s influence with the president.
For weeks, Seward had acted under “two s
upreme illusions”: first, that he was in reality the man in charge; and second, that Southerners would be appeased by the abandonment of Sumter and would eventually return to the Union. He had risked his good name on his conviction that Lincoln would follow his advice and surrender Sumter. Three commissioners had been sent to Washington by the Confederacy to negotiate, among other issues, the question of the forts. Lincoln, however, had refused to allow any dealings with them on the grounds that direct communication would legitimize the seceded states. Stifled, Seward had resorted to an indirect link through Alabama’s John Campbell, who had remained on the Supreme Court despite the secession of his state. After the March 15 cabinet meeting, Seward, believing that his vote to evacuate would soon be confirmed by Lincoln, had sent a message that Campbell relayed to the commissioners, who reported to the Confederacy’s capital, then located in Montgomery, Alabama: Sumter “would be evacuated in the next five days.”
Desperate to save his own honor and prevent the country from drifting into war, while the administration established no clear-cut policy, Seward composed an extraordinary memo that would become the source of great criticism and controversy. During the afternoon of April 1, Fred Seward recalled, his father wrote “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration.” Since his “handwriting was almost illegible,” he asked Fred to copy it over and bring it personally to Lincoln, not allowing it “to be filed, or to pass into the hands of any clerk.”
“We are at the end of a month’s Administration, and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” the contentious memo began. Seward proceeded to reiterate his argument for abandoning Fort Sumter, placing new emphasis on reinforcing Fort Pickens. He asserted that focusing on Fort Pickens rather than on Sumter would allow Lincoln to retain “the symbolism of Federal authority” with far less provocation. Seward’s mistake was not the diabolical plot that some critics later charged, but a grave misreading of the situation and a grave misunderstanding of Lincoln.
Seward continued under the heading of “For Foreign Nations,” suggesting that Lincoln deflect attention from the domestic crisis by demanding that Spain and France explain their meddling in the Western Hemisphere and that Great Britain, Canada, and Russia account for their threats to intervene in the American crisis. If the explanations of any country proved unsatisfactory, war should be declared. In fact, some such explanations were eventually demanded, convincing European leaders to be more careful in their response to the American situation. It was Seward’s wilder proposal of declaring war, if necessary, that would arouse the harsh rebuke of biographers and historians.
Nor did Seward’s overreaching end there. The previous February, Seward had informed a German diplomat “that there was no great difference between an elected president of the United States and an hereditary monarch.” Neither truly ran things. “The actual direction of public affairs belongs to the leader of the ruling party.” Seward had conceived of himself as a prime minister, with Lincoln the figurehead. Testing this presumptuous notion, Seward closed with the idea that “whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it…. Either the President must do it himself…or DEVOLVE it on some member of his Cabinet…. It is not in my especial province. But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.” As Nicolay later wrote, “had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or a resentful man, he could not have wished for a better occasion to put a rival under his feet.” Seward’s effrontery easily could have provoked a swift dismissal. Yet, as happened so often, Lincoln showed an “unselfish magnanimity,” which was “the central marvel of the whole affair.”
The president immediately dashed off a reply to Seward that he would never send, probably preferring to respond in person. Buried in Lincoln’s papers, the document was not unearthed until decades later, as Nicolay and Hay labored on their massive Lincoln biography. Lincoln’s response was short but pointed. Concerning the assertion that the administration was “without a policy,” Lincoln reminded Seward of his inaugural pledge that “the power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government.” This was the “exact domestic policy” that Seward called for, “with the single exception, that it does not propose to abandon Fort Sumpter.” As for the charge that the administration lacked a foreign policy, “we have been preparing circulars, and instructions to ministers…without even a suggestion that we had no foreign policy.” The idea of engineering a foreign war to reunify the country did not even rate a response.
Lincoln responded most emphatically to Seward’s suggestion that perhaps the secretary of state was needed to design and pursue a vigorous policy where the president had not. In unmistakable language, Lincoln wrote: “I remark that if this must be done, I must do it.”
Undaunted, Seward worked furiously to complete his plans for reinforcing Fort Pickens, hopeful that Lincoln might change his mind before the Fox expedition to Fort Sumter was launched. The previous day, he had sent an urgent summons to Captain Montgomery Meigs to come to his house. Recognizing that time was short, Seward requested Meigs “to put down upon paper an estimate & project for relieving & holding Fort Pickens” and “to bring it to the Presidents before 4 p.m.” Lincoln was happy to receive the army captain’s report, though in his mind, reinforcing Pickens did not mean choosing between the two garrisons. “Tell [Scott],” the president said, “that I wish this thing done & not to let it fail unless he can show that I have refused him something he asked for as necessary. I depend upon you gentlemen to push this thing through.”
Lincoln was cautioned by Seward that the army’s expedition to Pickens should be kept from naval authorities, given the number of navy men who were openly disloyal to the Union. Lincoln signed orders on April 1 to Andrew Foote, the commandant of the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, to “fit out the Powhatan without delay” for a secret mission to Pensacola under the command of Lieutenant David Porter. The Powhatan was the U.S. Navy’s most powerful warship. “Under no circumstances” should “the fact that she is fitting out” be disclosed to the Navy Department, Lincoln emphasized. Both Navy Secretary Welles and Captain Fox, whose plans for the relief of Sumter depended on the Powhatan, remained unaware of the secret orders. With its mighty guns and three hundred sailors, the Powhatan was supposed to play an essential role in backing up the tugboats carrying supplies to Sumter.
Lincoln had failed to peruse the orders carefully and inadvertently assigned the Powhatan simultaneously to both Pickens and Sumter. In the confusion of the first weeks, it was not unusual for Lincoln to sign documents from Seward without reading them. Fred Seward later recalled that when he brought papers over to the White House for signature, Lincoln would say: “Your father says this is all right, does he? Well, I guess he knows. Where do I put my name?”
Still ignorant of the mix-up, Welles wrote to Samuel Mercer, the current commander of the Powhatan, on April 5, instructing him to “leave New York with the Powhatan in time to be off Charleston bar” by the morning of the 11th. If the supply boats were permitted to land at Fort Sumter, he should return to New York at once. If their entry was opposed, then the Powhatan and its support ships should be used “to open the way.” Should the “peaceable” supply mission fail, “a reinforcement of the garrison” should be attempted by “disposing of your force,” as needed. The orders from Welles to Mercer were read to the president that same day and authorized.
The next day, Lincoln drafted a letter for Cameron to send through a messenger to the governor of South Carolina: “I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made, to supply Fort-Sumpter with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made without further notice.” Lincoln had devised a means to separate the peaceful supply mission from the more controversial issue of reinforcement, forging, at least for the record, a final alternative to war.
While Lincoln’s strategy was creative, its execution was fatall
y bungled. Learning that the Pickens expedition was “embarrassed by conflicting orders from the Secretary of the Navy,” Captain Meigs had telegraphed Seward for an explanation. Placed in an awkward situation, Seward knew he would have to reveal the secret Pickens mission to Welles. Sometime after 11 p.m., Seward and Fred took a short walk to the Willard to talk with Welles. Earlier that evening, Welles, assuming that the Powhatan and its accompanying ships had already set sail for Sumter, had congratulated himself on accomplishing so much in such a short time.
Seward showed Welles the telegram, explaining that it must relate to the Powhatan, which was now under command of David Porter and on its way to Pensacola. Welles insisted that was impossible. The Powhatan was “the flagship” of the mission to Sumter. They decided to consult the president at once. Though midnight was approaching, Lincoln was still awake. Upon hearing the problem, he “looked first at one and then the other, and declared there was some mistake.” Once the error was clear, he told Seward to send Porter a telegram, ordering him to “return the Powhatan to Mercer without delay,” so that the Sumter expedition could proceed. Seward tried to champion the Pickens expedition, but Lincoln “was imperative,” insisting that the telegram go out that night.
To the astonishment of Welles, Lincoln “took upon himself the whole blame—said it was carelessness, heedlessness on his part—he ought to have been more careful and attentive.” In fact, Welles continued, Lincoln “often declared that he, and not his Cabinet, was in fault for errors imputed to them.” Seward reluctantly sent the telegram; but Porter had already set sail for Florida. A fast ship was dispatched to catch up with the Powhatan, but when Porter read the telegram, bearing Seward’s signature instead of the president’s, he continued to Florida, on the assumption that the previous order signed by the president had priority.